German theatre: “Wallenstein”

If you like very long plays

This will grip you from lunch until midnight

PETER STEIN is a maverick. Once considered the doyen of serious German drama, he now shuns his native country's heavily subsidised theatres and works alone. Nearing 70, he lives in a Tuscan farmhouse with his actress wife, Maddalena Crippa, and plans many of his productions from there.

Charisma beneath the straggly hair

Mr Stein specialises in extremely long shows. In 1980 he opened a new theatre in Berlin with a production of Aeschylus's huge trilogy, “The Oresteia”. He produced the same three plays in Moscow, a performance in Russian that was then staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1994 at what is normally an ice rink. In 2000 he mounted a 21-hour version of Goethe's two-part “Faust” at Hanover's Expo. Some critics considered this to be a definitive performance of “Faust”; others found its attention to realistic detail to be too literal and even unimaginative.

Similar demands on an audience's attention are now being made with a ten-hour staging in a converted brewery in south-east Berlin of Friedrich Schiller's “Wallenstein”, a play in three parts. Mr Stein's production, which was shown earlier this summer and reopens after a break on August 25th, is gripping, sweeping along with epic verve.

It begins with soldiers, their every hat, sash and sword carefully crafted, carousing as they debate their leader, Albrecht von Wallenstein, who is fighting for the Catholic emperor, Ferdinand II, in the Thirty Years' War. Parts two and three tell the stories of General Octavio Piccolomini's devotion to the emperor, his son Max's love for Wallenstein's daughter, Thekla, and finally Wallenstein's embrace of the Protestant cause and assassination. It all unfolds on a vast stage, with screens creating echoing chambers and corridors.

“Wallenstein” was popular in the 1960s, says Mr Stein, but had more or less disappeared by the decade's end. Association with Prussian militarism, let alone Hitler, made it unfashionable. If it was staged at all, it was usually in a shortened form which, Mr Stein claims, reduced it to “a hollow-sounding historical drama”. The play, he says, is about an intelligent man able to do something about his destiny. “He never fights in the drama. He plots, tries, but fails, to get the politics right and is full of self-doubt.”

The part of Wallenstein is played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, an Austrian actor who was the lead in István Szabó's film “Mephisto” and played Bror Blixen in “Out of Africa”. Mr Brandauer, surrounded by excellent performances from Peter Fitz, Jürgen Holtz and Friederike Becht, is perhaps one of the less remarkable aspects of the production. His charisma can be glimpsed beneath his lumbering gait and straggly hair, but his delivery is a bit monotone. Without giving any indication that he was unhappy with Mr Brandauer, Mr Stein pointed out that the actor “was in another league and, as a film star, cost three times what a normal actor does. But we met and instantly he wanted to do it.”

With complete confidence in the structure of the play, Mr Stein sees no reason “to resort to helicopters or such stupid tricks”. His rigorous adherence to the text, his conductor's sense of rhythm and tempo, and his conviction that things on stage can be magnificent and still full of meaning are Mr Stein's trademarks. He insists on remaining an outsider but this performance proves him to be one of Germany's most potent theatrical conjurors.

“Wallenstein”, at the Kindl-Brauerei, Berlin, will be shown 13 times between August 25th and October 7th.